'Pain make man think. Thought make man wise. Wisdom make life endurable' : Sakini, in "The Tea House of the August Moon" by John Patrick, (1953)

Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Is Another World Possible? – Leo Panitch on Reality Asserts Itself

Prof. Leo Panitch says it’s a dilemma that
the gradualism of European social-democracy and attempts at a more radical
transformation have so far both failed; Panitch says a first step towards
democratizing the economy is to make finance a public utility

PAUL JAY: Welcome back to the Real News Network.
This is Reality Asserts Itself, and I’m Paul Jay. And we’re continuing our
discussion with Leo Panitch, who joins us in the studio. Thanks for joining us
again, Leo.

LEO PANITCH: Glad to be back, Paul.

PAUL JAY: So, one more time, Leo’s a professor
emeritus and senior scholar at York University in Toronto, and co-author with
Sam Gindin of Making of Global Capitalism, the Political Economy of the
American Empire. We left off saying we were gonna talk about is another world
possible, which was the theme of the world social forums, and I suppose many
books and articles. I think there used to be, and this is because of the
Russian revolution and maybe the Chinese revolution, the thinking always was
you’d have some revolution, and you’d have this massive uprising and an
insurrection, and here would come socialism and you would nationalize most of
everything, and off you would go.

Whether or not that
worked in Russia and China … I shouldn’t say whether or not, because in the long
run, we know it didn’t. Whether that works in some conditions in some places,
perhaps it did to some extent in Cuba, but it’s hard to believe that this
insurrectionary model is applicable to a Europe or a North America or any of
the advanced capitalist countries at any rate. How do you see a socialist, and
I think you have to distinguish between socialist aspects of the economy and a
change of which class has political power, because they’re connected, but not
necessarily the same. How do you envision that process?

LEO PANITCH: Yeah, you’re right in what you said about
the state and perception that you could change things overnight in an
insurrectionary revolution that would last. I think the experience has been how
hard that is to do and even if change did occur, it occurred in a way that
those societies got isolated from the capitalist system. This produced a form
of rapid industrialization that was undemocratic. If it was planned, it was
centrally planned in an undemocratic manner, and that proved its undoing in
many respects.

But the other side of
the problem is those socialists who adopted a gradualist perspective, also ran
up against the limits. The parties that were parliamentarist, electorist, the
social democratic parties, some of whom remain Marxists, until officially at
least, until the last quarter of the 20th century. They introduced, in so far
as they got elected to government, they introduced certain reforms, which they
always presented as building blocks to an eventual socialism, getting beyond
capitalism, but those reforms ran up against the limits of being embedded in a
capitalist society. So the welfare reforms were structured in such a way,
partly due to bureaucratic and capitalist opposition, but also because of the
logic of the system, that they didn’t give you enough so that you didn’t need
to go back to work or upset the labor market, right.

And the
nationalizations, in so far as they occurred in some crucial industries, they
were usually of industries that were failing. The state would take them over.
They were run in a fashion that didn’t allow for workers’ control because it
would always be said that the workers would give away the secrets of the
industry or the corporation to competitors, and anyway workers aren’t capable
of running such complex things. So, they were statist in their form, not
democratic, and increasingly oriented themselves to be competitive. And as
these reforms, these public institutions didn’t have an enormous base of
support, initially they did. And in so far as there were fiscal problems, tax
problems inside capitalist states, they would say, “Well, we need to open up
those arenas to capital accumulation,” which becomes the basis of
public-private partnerships, but also the privatizations that we’ve lived through.

PAUL JAY: And many of the reforms have since, of
Thatcher, Reagan and others have gone away.